You have to provision for peak bandwidth, so as an ISP or access provider, if you have n customers, you want to know the mean peak bandwidth (mpb) so you can calculate B = mpb * n, so you know how big your pipes need to be. (This approximation only works for sufficiently large values of n, when it works extremely well. The calculation for small n is much more complicated, and less accurate).

You can get to mpb from monthly usage by dividing monthly usage by the seconds in a month to get mean bandwidth (m) and applying a correction factor. If the normal usage is web pages, then mpb will be rather larger than m, whereas if your customers stream the shopping channel 24x7 it'll be the same.

Twitter »

Follow us to receive Twitter updates when new discussions are posted in our forums: